So a 19 year old cabin crew is as important as a 50 year old, highly experienced captain with associated training etc....? Hmmm, I didn’t know that I had gone to sleep and woken up in 1960s chairman Mao communist China. On a human level of course all are equal and all will get the 1k. Well done J2!

The 1k bonus will be going to all colleagues apparently.

However if you look at the rough payrises:

​​​​​​8% to a Captain equates to a 9k uplift

12% to a Cabin Crew on 25k is roughly a 3k uplift

Not quite communist China just yet....

However there have been eyebrows raised recently that there are cabin crew taking home more a month than some FOs due to their commission. Good for them to be honest, a senior FO now is closer to 90k than 70k and that's with no bonus this year.

In fairness Whitemonk I agree and think that the cabin crew work hard and deserve a better than usual uplift, fair play to them. Also, Jet 2 didn’t have to do anything but they did. I may be biased but if there is a better airline in the U.K. right now I would be surprised.

There isn't, and truthfully I hope Jet2s approach to their staff forces the hand of all the other UK airlines because at the end of the day the better things are for others the better things are for all of us. The one thing I will say about the company is it comes from the top, anyone who had ever stood in a room with the real top people in Jet2 would probably agree that they come across as genuinely good people, tough decisions have to be made at times but ultimately I trust them to do the right thing. Now if they could just clear out all of the middle managers I'd truly be in paradise...

Subjective.
For me it’s good but they only have 1 base in the south. Career wise SH for 30 years? Not for me thanks. Pros and cons and every airline. Its what you rate as most important.

It is great J2 have given pay rises hopefully it will raise the eyebrows of others.

Does anyone know if J2 will be able to consider applications from current contractors they are using to fly for them this summer? Or if there is an embargo on crews from these airlines? Lots of colleagues very interested in J2 as they seem great and terms and conditions much better than else where.

I guess that depends if your world is Londoncentric. Stansted is in the South, and so is Bristol. And Birmingham and even East Midlands are Southish.

But you’re right about the career thing. Hopefully they will have a transparent fleet transfer policy eventually, at least you could then do Boeing and then Bus when you get bored, or the other way around. Personally I feel sorry for anyone starting in the RHS of a 737 or Airbus at any airline in their twenties. You might end up at 65 with good seniority and pension but doing European short haul your whole life would be desperately boring. Sadly BA is still the only place in the U.K. where you can really switch from one to the other and back again, apart from TUI to some extent…

J2 have previously taken people from Titan, and Titan have recently taken people from J2 so I would hope it wouldn't be an issue.

There definitely is no embargo on contractors who have flown for the company, if anything I would say you would probably be top of the que if you applied.

Just to respond to the posts above re career and southish bases etc, I don't even know if I will be here in 10 years so I don't want to come across as too much of a saleswoman but let me say two things I believe based on nothing more than instinct

Two things will happen:

LGW will be a J2 base

Long haul is less than 3 years away, with Air Tanker flying the initial season to handle all of the initial risk.

Remember, the company have 70+ Airbus on order, nowhere does it say the aircraft are exclusively A321... And many of our cabin crew and engineers are now A330 qualified...
​

Interesting!

The problem with Gatwick as a base for any airline is that there are already a huge number of aircraft based there with other operators. Makes for a very busy first wave outbound and not much room for anybody else. If Jet2 continued to have bases in the med they could fly into Gatwick from there I suppose? There is also the possibility to do W patterns from other UK bases.

With regards to longer flights, the A321neo already has an extra 1-2 hours on the 737 for range at high payload. I'm sure they are eyeing up destinations around 6-7hrs flying time.

Regarding applications, anyone heard anything yet?!

and pilots.

Find that way too negative and judgemental. I started on an 150 seat narrowbody in my twenties, upgraded to CPT and trainer relatively quickly (both after less than 10 years) and I still tremendously enjoy flying around Europe. So far I have flown to all the major airports in Europe (MAD, FRA, MUC, LHR, ZRH, AMS, CDG, FCO), I have flown to all the typical charter destinations (canaries, the greek islands, PMI, IBZ, corsica, sardinia, ...), all that mixed with lots of smaller european cities (ALC, FAO, NCE, BUD, WAW, these are just examples, there are a three digit figure of them), and besides all that I flew as far as the canaries, north africa, egypt, israel, russia, iceland etc.

It was pretty much everything within 5h of flight time of central europe and with 1700m of concrete. It is a tremendous variety in flying challenges and it all comes with hardly any night flights, no jetlag and no flat-sitting of your backside for hours over an ocean.

I might want at one point to go longhaul, but if not, no regrets either.

If I go longhaul, I'd prefer a medium size widebody which has a more divers route network. The thought of going to the same 8 destinations for 20 years sounds scarily boring to me. But each to their own.

Wow... have you considered applying to the European Space Agency?

I think this might be the single smuggest post I have ever had the misfortune of reading on PPrune.

And it pretty well makes my point for me, if 1201alarm has done all these things by his or her mid thirties, and mastered all the challenges a short haul airline can offer what is she or he going to do for the next thirty years apart from more of the same, either in the aircraft or in the back of the sim. Eventually it reaches a point where the major challenge of the day (depending on which airline you fly for) is finding the controls and screen for the flight deck door camera.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy European ops with the airline I fly for, which may or may not be connected with this thread, but I’m glad that my (so far) 40 years of flying started with something different. But for the benefit of 1201alarm I would point out that I stated that it was a personal opinion, and not meant to be judgemental of anyone who finds themselves in the situation I described. The world has changed since I started, there is less chance of military training in the U.K., expat job opportunities in GA are fewer than they were, and the self improver route has pretty well died in the U.K.

Anyway that all went a bit of topic, I believe that jet2 is a good place to work, good luck to all in the recruitment process…

Jet2's avoidance of bad press this year has been because they don't have a LGW base.

So you barely scratched the surface then.

I have spent 5 years blasting around Europe and 99 times out of 100 it’s pretty easy.

The thought of flying around Europe for 30+ more years would be soul destroying.

5 years, wow, so which company are you Chief Pilot for at the moment?

They have a Manchester base and that's been just as bad. It's just that the biggest users of MAN have coped better than EZY.

It seems I aroused some souls... :confused:

Just wanted to make a counter point by stating what European flying can offer if you are in the right company, and I define "the right company" not with the money earned. Money was always fair, not huge, but not little either, just fair.

Don't know what you meant by scratching the surface, and what you consider easy or not.

Well, I enjoy dealing with the daily mishaps, challenges and opportunities of optimization in shorthaul ops.

I try to coordinate my turnaround so I can get offblock 3 min earlier. I enjoy asking for a visual and cutoff 5 min of flight time. I enjoy calling ops control to switch aircraft for some good reason when ops control had a bad chaotic day and lost oversight. I enjoy calling the ramp agent on the company frequency and organise a quick transfer in his little van to a passengers connecting flight, if it is the pasengers last chance to reach destination on that day and we are behind schedule. I like to go into the italian terminal during turnaround and buy cornetti con crema for the whole crew. I calculate a takeoff performance full length and another for the intersection when sensible and when I see on taxiout that the intersection gives me an immediate departure I will let the controller know that we can accept the intersection.

I could go on and on and on with such examples, some might find that "astronaut" or "smmuggy" but I just enjoy making a difference, it gives me satisfaction and helps my company to continue to pay a fair salary.

If you don't enjoy that, may be you became a pilot for the wrong motives? Piloting is not heroic anymore, neither extremely well paid, but you are a manager of an expensive machine in a very complex environment. If you don't enjoy that, well, don't know then. Sounds sad to me. And I don't mean to offend anyone here.

Why so condescending?

This isn’t talking about going into management or training.

Talking about SH flying. Specifically flying in Europe, yes it’s busy in places but it is fairly easy. We don’t get hurricanes, tornados, monsoons. ATC is generally very good, few places can be difficult. Yes you can make it more challenging, depending on what your airline allows, raw data ILS, NDB, VOR etc you’re still only getting experience within 5-6hrs from Central Europe. The best captains I have learnt from are guys/gals that have flown in other parts of the world.

I'm assuming the banter tennis is because the interviews haven't started yet.....

Has anyone else applied with an EASA license?

I have applied for a UK CAA license but still waiting for it 2 months later. I included this in my application, I hope it will be accepted, anyone able to advise?

Anyone heard anything yet?

Nope, applied they day it opened and still nothing. Anyone else?

All quiet.
I've heard that there have been over 7000 applications. +4000 have EASA licences. These numbers will include various experience and levels of currency.

Have you also heard that the contract offered, including to the 102 that were laid off, but would be invited back, is only part year? However, no reduction in yearly hours limit…. Not quite as good as it seems.

Me

I imagine large numbers of EU citizens without the right to work in the UK have applied, removing all of these I imagine (hope) that number comes down quite rapidly

Many disillusioned/worried TUI pilots by the sound of it😎

Again, this is word of mouth, but 70% for the first year (full time Summer, 50% Winter) and 100% year 2.
There is a good chance recruitment will be onto the 737 (bonded) then in the queue for Airbus. Without confirmation from J2, all this is speculation.

I genuinely don't know what had been offered this time round but the quote above has historically been for non jet rated pilots, jet pilots usually got offered 100% from day one but we live in different times now.

Also worth mentioning re the comment above with no reduction in yearly hours for 70%....

This isn't RYR, there isn't a pilot in the history of Jet2 who has ever come close to 900 hours in a calender year, id wager a fair wad of cash that the number of guys who have flown over 750 is in single digits.

I know some recruitment has started as I heard some interviews were happening last week

Apprentice interviews have started

Well?

Anyone at J2 care to pitch in:

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel...-b2132993.html

Not sure the fight forum. Should be moved to main Jet2 in Misc🤨

Probably is the right forum as it’s of interest to people applying for jobs, although tbh I expect most out of work pilots would sign a contract with the devil at the moment, especially if they’re not type rated.

Before I start I will just say that 1. Jet2 have a social media policy which says that employees shouldn’t mention that they work there on social media and 2. I’m a member of BALPA. That’s important because this story in the independent had almost certainly come from BALPA. For those that don’t know BALPA only have recognition at J2 because they went to ACAS when the company refused to recognise them. There has been a continual battle since as the company will only negotiate on the absolute minimum things which they have to, and refuse to enter into discussions about rostering. This stance seems to be to the advantage of the pilots in some ways, as the company generally gives fairly generous pay increases very early in the negotiating process so that BALPA can’t claim to have negotiated it.

The rostering /fatigue issues are a different subject and my experience will be different to others and will depend on seat and base. But my experience this summer is that, if I worked for them, apart from a period of disruption for a few weeks in May / June is that it’s no better or worse than any of the six other airlines I’ve worked for. If I have concerns about discretion I can call crewing and refuse to work into it which I have done, and had no comeback. I’ve submitted a future fatigue report once this summer and my roster was changed as a result and the only communication was the roster change and an email from crewing saying that they agreed with my concerns. We had an email from BALPA a couple of days ago saying that some of the problems had been caused by inexperienced crewing officers, and I suspect that is true, a few times I’ve spoken to them and had to quote the rules of the crewing agreement, but I’ve done that and spoken to crewing supervisors and problems ha e been sorted. Just like other places I’ve worked.

At some point someone is going to come on here and go on about me drinking “the company cool aid”. As a general principle I would like to see more cooperation with the union, but bearing in mind what this thread is about I’m prepared to put up with it this summer because of the unusual world events of the last two years.
and the bad news for some people reading this is that crew gossip says there were 4000 applications for approximately 100 DEP positions, so it looks like plenty of other people will put up with it too.

They have never or tried to do that at EZY. BALPA played a massive role in preventing a lot of pilots being made redundant at EZY, we were probably one of a minority who didn’t have any pilot redundancies,

Last year every EZY pilot was offered their original full time contract back as promised. Many skippers including myself actually enjoyed the part time lifestyle and elected to remain on it. Our terms and conditions were never touched…they did try, but membership in BALPA grew to its highest level and surpassed BA in numbers I believe and fought off PB who has recently left to spend more time with his family.

On what planet do you have to live to believe that having next to no union recognition is better than having a strong union?

Delusional.

Any rated Captains had a call for assessment yet?

Galley FM says they're concentrating on FO's first